(Trans)Woman In Progress: The Perpetual Emotion Machine

I am the gerbil powering the Perpetual Emotion Machine. Except that I'm not. No, I'm racing in the wheel, but it's the wheel's turning that's forcing me to run, and not the other way around. Fear into shame, shame into doubt, doubt into fear. All without end.

There's DVDs to teach "Feminine Movement," DVDs to teach voice feminization, DVDs to teach makeup, padding and impersonation. It's all about "passing." It's all about fear, it's all about shame, and it's all about doubt.

Don't get me wrong. I mean to be in no way critical to the transwomen who've used these things to blend in and build successful lives. Much of what these tools teach are absolutely necessary for transwomen to understand (even if they don't practice them), in order to cope with and participate in our society. The less conspicuous you can be, the more secure you are and the more rewarding your life becomes. But it's still about fear, still about shame, and still about doubt.

The fears are everywhere: Can observers tell that I'm trans? What if this Doctor refuses to treat me? If I stop and ask for directions with my voice as deep as it is, will Security come by and escort me out of the store? What if my Mother never comes to accept who I am? Does the building caretaker know about me yet, and will he flip out when he shows up to fix the tub, only to find me dressed this way? How are the customers at work going to deal with my sudden transition, when some of them have known the old me for 18 years? Does he really think I'm as attractive as he's saying, or is he secretly thinking with disappointment, "she has a man's lips; she has a man's tiny hips; she has a man's hands?"

Underlying all of that is the shame: the shame of being different; the shame of not having been able to live up to prior expectations; the shame of having hurt so many people close to you in order to have your freedom; the shame of being a minority that can't help but be visible when you're walking down the street, a minority that the public associates with mental illness and Michael Jackson.

And it's when all of these converge on you that the doubts set in. Rarely are the doubts about whether you are doing the right thing by transitioning. Instead, the doubts are about whether you are strong enough, whether you are safe in your life, whether people will allow you to live in peace, whether you will ever find any respect or (harder still) love, doubts whether there will ever be a place in this world where you belong.

And when the doubts take you, you become very afraid. When you are allowed to think about any of it, this is what keeps the whole process steamrolling.

But the transsexual has an advantage: none of these things are at all new to us. They have always been there, only the applications are different.

Before, the fear was whether you "passed" as a boy. Would you get beat up if the kids thought you were queer? Is this walk that I've been practicing working, and does it look manly enough? What if I can't be the "little man" my Mother wants me to be? What if someone finds the doll I've hidden in my closet? Much later, the fear becomes: What if I can't satisfy my girlfriend or she finds out that I'm strange -- will she reject me?

The shame of being different, of course, was always a constant, and it's sometimes not until your teen years that you realize that you're not the only person on the bloody planet who is different in this way. And the doubts, those are still there as you wonder if you'll ever feel at home anywhere; wonder if your marriage to someone you really care about can last, when you can't stand playing the role that you're supposed to play in it; wonder if you can go on living with the fear and the shame.

That's part of what people don't "get" about transitioning. This is not like dressing up one day on Halloween and becoming somebody else (although I did once enjoy the holiday as a rare opportunity to escape the trap of my life for a few hours). For the pre-transition transsexual, it's every other day of the year that is about pretending. Although the body may have been made male, the identity never was.

Instructional DVDs notwithstanding, we are not "playing" anything. We are allowing ourselves to be what we've hidden all our lives, until we couldn't take the suffocation anymore. The instructional DVDs are little compared to the lessons of adolescence, parental guidance and friendly advice from confidantes that women receive over the course of their lives, and really doesn't undermine that. Because we take the advice, or we ignore it, but it's all about learning what is comfortable to us, and what makes sense to us. I don't walk like Danae Doyle tells me to (personally, I don't think many real women do, except when occasions call for more decorum), although I don't regret buying the disc, and realize that there were some subtleties to learn from.

What's different, then, and what's to be gained from transition is to be free of the sense of hiding. You can lose the suffocation of wearing a mask. It can be difficult, because some of us have worn that mask so long, we're not sure who it is that's underneath anymore -- and then we have to undertake a process to rediscover that. But it's that sense of freedom that can be had.

That is, unless a person simply trades one mask for another. That is the risk of transition. If they try to become the woman that they think they're supposed to be, it really isn't going to be a whole lot different from when they tried to be the man they were told that they were supposed to be. The key is, instead, to allow themselves to discover the woman that they are (or man, in the case of FTMs).

I believe, however (and have been told this by many who have transitioned), that doing so brings one unexpected difference. As you become more comfortable in your new skin, you begin to blend in better (although possibly not completely), and that fear and shame and doubt, over time, does something you never expected: it slows, and then ceases to drive you.

I'm not there yet, but I'm looking forward to it. And praying that this isn't a myth.

Fractured Transland: The Transgender Community Today

Now here's a conversation for you: your girlfriend calls you over and asks, "Honey, does this skirt make my butt look big?" to which you reply, "Absolutely, darling." At this, she beams, gives you a peck on the cheek, says "Great! Thanks, hon!" and twirls around to head back to the bedroom to finish dressing for the evening.

Such are the benefits of dating a skinny transsexual who wishes she had more curvature at the hips.

In the transgender world, all the presuppositions go out the window. There is diversity, sometimes irreconcilably so, and all of the gender rules are open to interpretation. Unfortunately, this can lead to a lot of division.

Even the way in which we define ourselves can be the source of immense infighting. To some, "crossdresser" is anyone who wears clothes that belong to other than our biological sex. To others, a crossdresser is someone who wears clothes of the other sex for pleasure, and has no interest in gender change or living as a woman. To some, a "transsexual" is someone who has gone through the entire process and has already had sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) -- to these, they were considered "transgendered" before the surgery. To others, "transsexual" is the transition phase instead, and after SRS, the person becomes their chosen gender. Some people use "transsexual" to cover the entire range of gender-ambiguous behaviour, and others use the word "transgender." Other times, "transgender" is just a specific phase. It gets confusing. I've seen the terms defined a myriad of ways, and each time, the person defining them is adamant that their definition is proper. Whatever.

So you can start to see why the trans community is always so divided and hard to unite. The divisions are only the first reason for this.

For the record (and hopefully a bit of clarification; I try to use these words they way I most often hear them myself), I define "transsexual" as someone on hormones and in that state between physical genders, before final surgery (which is where I am), "transgender" as the general blanket term, "drag queen" (or king) as someone who dresses (or sometimes overdresses) for exhibitionistic shock value or performance (often with no interest in transition, although there are drag perfomers who do it to pay for their transition), "genderqueer" as people who like to screw with gender definitions and want to live somewhere in the middle (usually without any bodily changes; sometimes sexual orientation comes in here), "intersexed" as having been born with some combination of primary and secondary sexual characteristics of both genders, "crossdresser" as someone who dresses recreationally, "transvestite" is a more specific crossdresser who enjoys a sexual fetish of it rather than truly identifying as the other sex, "two-spirited" as people who've come to acknowledge both male and female identities and have chosen to express both in various ways, "androgynous" as being gender-ambiguous (sometimes unintentionally and sometimes in ways that border on genderqueer). Even in these categories, there can be divisions -- for example, some transsexuals choose never to have the SRS (perhaps orchidectomy in MTFs) -- in transmen, it can be because of the limitations of the surgery; in transwomen, it can be because of a partner's preference, or because their own gender identity still includes their birth genitalia.

Added to this is the fact that transitioning from male to female can be very a different experience at times from that of transitioning female to male. Transmen are lucky at first, in that testosterone masculinizes them very quickly, and they can often "pass" as male easily, early in their transition -- for transwomen, this can take years, or they might never "pass" completely at all (a possibility that I've had to accept). Transmen's voices deepen fairly well and fairly quickly, while a transwoman's will never change without vocal training (and god forbid that they try voice surgery, which usually causes far more damage than it solves). However, in the later stages of transition, transmen really have the poor part of the bargain: they have three to four surgeries instead of one (mastectomy, hysterectomy and phallo- or metaplasty), the result of SRS rarely looks real enough for them, can be problematic in function, can be prone to infection... their surgery is just not developed as well. Worse, the transman's entire circle of friendships tends to change -- most start out in the lesbian community, but upon transition they're almost immediately ostracized as being "traitors," as though they're betraying the female gender in order to obtain male privilege. There are also strong differences in the ways in which we were socialized as male or female, things that we have to overcome during transition and get used to. For example, there is the experience of FTMs who discover that in girl days they could speak freely and comfortably with people -- but after transition, women view them as dangerous and predatory, and the men they can now associate with become uncomfortable if conversation strays too far from the realm of the superficial. This is all based on how people are taught to be, and this particular experience is unique to transmen alone.

Troubles arise when transfolk look at their own paths taken, and come to the conclusion that the entire transgender experience always follows the same linear path that they have -- i.e. that everyone starts out crossdressing, then becomes two-spirited while trying to define themselves, then androgynous, then transsexual, or whatever. And the fact of the matter is that no set of rules apply to all -- no experience of trans is the "right" one, that is for everyone to decide for themselves.

Another point of contention arises from the issue of blending in. Older generations feel that this is the ultimate objective, to eventually "pass" perfectly, and to slip into society with no one ever having to know where we came from. Unfortunately, this has made the trans community very transitory, with people tending to move on after transition, and not being there as much for those starting the process (to be fair, much of this also has to do with the fact that the trans community is currently very much about the process, and once a person is past it, continuing to dwell on the process seems pointless). Younger generations, on the other hand, feel that it's imperative to be visible, proud of being trans, and to never hide where we've come from. There is some virtue to that, since our community has so few spokespeople, so few role models, and so few people visible in the community to reassure the public that we are not the perverted and mentally ill people that they're envisioning. For role models, who do we have? Jaye Davidson, a member of Toto and a Wachkowski? No offense to them, but that sometimes doesn't feel like much. When she comes out of hiding, Renee Richards is often very negative and discouraging about the process (probably largely because of the publicity she received in her time), so it's hard to look at her example for guidance.

But this is always a choice, dependent on each person's comfort level. Not every person can blend in. Not everyone wants to completely abandon the masculinity or femininity that they're leaving behind. Not everyone wants to be in plain sight, with everyone constantly reminding them of their transition. The choice is always different. I am transitioning publically right now, but I have no idea if six years from now I might want to drop out of sight and find a normal, boring life. This decision cannot be dictated, and can't be foreseen until that day happens.

In Edmonton, there has been a definite need for some kind of unified support. There have been many attempts, and a lot of divisions, sometimes as much over personalities as definitions. The FTMs have had more success at gathering, but because the FTM experience is so different, transwomen have sometimes felt unintentionally alienated, and are even more dispersed. I don't know what the solution is.

But what I do know comes from the lessons of history. We’ve seen it happen in the lesbian community, where "butch / femme" lesbians were bold enough to stand up for their community, and were later jettisoned for being politically incorrect stereotypes. These were the people who had fostered the movement so much in the early days, and then their own movement betrayed them. Closer to home, it was drag queens like Sylvia Rivera who threw the first bottles and stones at the Stonewall riot that touched off the Gay Pride movement. But by 1973, gay advocacy groups decided that transpeople were a political liability. Suddenly, transgendered people were being consciously left off the proposed legislation that eventually earned gays and lesbians the rights they won.

"I've been working in this movement for thirty years and I'm still begging for what you've got" -- Sylvia Rivera, 2001

This is where I see the division as killing us. Sometimes I hear transsexuals talking about drag queens as being an embarassment, and creating bad stereotypes. But when there was no information on transsexualism, drag performers spread some awareness of our existence. When it didn’t seem like there was anywhere that a transsexual belonged, the drag community provided glimmers of hope. Most transsexuals choose to slip into society in “stealth” after SRS. And when they do, the drag community will still be there, teaching new generations of transsexuals how to tuck or how to choose clothes to fit and flatter their atypical bodies. As embarrassed as anyone may ever feel because of drag artists, we always have to remember that their support, their courage and their moxie has done at least as much positive as negative. We cannot forget our roots.

These are the bridges we must build.

(Trans)Woman In Progress: A Journal, part one

It's all in the wrist. Remembering this makes me think of my school years.

I think it was around age eight or nine that I finally figured out the secret to walking like a man. This was important, because I kept getting teased at school and was desperate to fit in, even if it meant practicing stupid things like this in front of the mirror for hours every day.

The secret arrived in the form of the dialogue overheard on one of my mother's soap operas, a comment about how men always walk around dragging their knuckles about everything. Of course, the real meaning was lost on an elementary school kid, and so there I was, practicing trying to look like a knuckle-dragging gorilla, ook-ook.

It worked. It worked beautifully.

The way I understand it, it's supposed to be instinctive as to how a man and woman hold hands. His hand clasps over, hers cups under. Or, I have to take everybody's word on that at least, because my instincts were always backwards to what I was supposed to be. That's one of the things about being a transsexual -- your brain never fits what you're given.

Anyhow, there's a subtle and fascinating difference in how men and women use their wrists and hands, and it makes a tremendous difference in how each present. Men tend to stand, walk, move with their knuckles forward, ready to rush right in and get hands-on with whatever situation they might find themselves in. Women tend to relax, hands at their sides, palms almost a few degrees toward the forefront, almost a subconscious kind of vulnerability (sorry, ladies). Men grab with their hands -- women accept.

This has all come back to me while I now try to unlearn all those things that I meticulously practiced as a kid, until they became reflex for me. I'm amazed how turning those palms just those few degrees forwards pulls up your posture, draws your elbows in, keeps you from lunging forward with your shoulders, and creates a whole new sense of grace. New, that is, now that I can return to a personal style that actually feels more natural than what I've been faking all my life.

I've realized that I can't stand to live as male anymore, and have decided to pursue a total gender change. When I say "realized," I mean, "hit a brick wall at 120 mph during an almost-total nervous breakdown," but you can interpret it as you like. I imagine this revelation must have been to my family like that of the Simpsons, when Homer leapt up and said, "You people have held me back long enough! I'm going to clown school!" Which also pretty much also sums up their thoughts on my sanity.

They're not alone. In 1974, homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and ceased to be treated like a mental illness. Thirty two years later, "Gender Identity Disorder" still is. Don't get me wrong -- I have had a very appreciative experience with the doctors who I've dealt with along the way (that is, except for some Medicenter experiences). And I realize the need to screen people for genuine cases versus those who are out for a kick, paraphiliacs and people who are simply confused or don't have the strength to see the process through -- as well as having that beginning link to medical professionals who can provide the hormones and surgery and guidance along the way. Not to mention that there is always the risk that if transgender is reclassified as a medical condition rather than a psychological one, the medical community which does not want it in its lap would be quite happy to classify it as cosmetic, thereby delisting the surgeries and hormone prescriptions from those few entities that cover them currently. But having a social system that considers it mental illness doesn't exactly do anything to help the rest of society to see its true face. And having to meet with your Doctor in a clinic that treats the criminally violent, the delusional, the obsessive-compulsive and the unstable -- everything from passive-aggressives to pedophiles -- doesn't do a whole lot for your sense of self-worth.

Either way, I have no doubts about my choice, not like my family does -- there's only the occasional doubt of my chance of success. The greater obstacle is the fear -- the terrors of a schoolkid, trying to fit in all over again, magnified by ten. And yet this is still vastly outweighed by the sensation (the relief) of being able to breathe again... which is essentially what being able to come out of the gender prison really feels like.

If my blog only leaves one single impression in the minds of those on the outside of the transgender world reading it, it would be this: it is every other day that is Halloween.

This is what I mean by the gender prison: you're trapped in the confines of a body that doesn't make sense to you. In order to try to fit in to what society wants you to be, you spend years trying to behave like society tells you to behave. If you're a male-to-female transsexual, that means that you've spent far too many years trying to "pass" as a man, and can't do it anymore.

It's a subtle difference that few seem to understand. The marketing of the film "Transamerica" illustrated this beautifully. The director mostly "got it" about trans people, Felicity Huffman mostly "got it" about trans people -- but Hollywood did not. The whole marketing machine turned into a circus sideshow barker, shouting, "see a woman playing a man playing a woman." It wasn't, "see Felicity Huffman playing a transsexual," it was "see Felicity Huffman playing a man playing a woman." People think of transsexuals as dressing up and having surgery to become someone else, a kind of Halloween outing taken to the extreme.

But it's every other day that is Halloween. It's about becoming tired of trying to pass as something you've been forced to be, by virtue of a body that doesn't feel like it belongs to you.

Which I'm sure is not easy to understand, from the perspective of those who've never experienced it. In the case of MTFs, everyone tries to teach you to be strong, silent, stoic, that proverbial knight-in-shining-armor. And hidden in your mind, you're really the sweet, vulnerable girl who daydreams about him, and wants to get swept away in his arms.

For this transwoman, that brick wall of realization hit in the wake of a failed marriage that I came to realize failed not because of my partner's shortcomings but far more because of my own frustrations and feelings of suffocation trying to live out a gender role that I loathed. Even when I was given the lattitude to not live up to that gender role, it was replaced with a vacuum, rather than an opportunity to live as I needed to.

The brick wall of realization also hit on a day that I decided to beat up a golf club and two fence boards with my body. Not that I had anything against said golf club and fence boards... maybe it was the three people holding them. It was a surreal moment, not something I was expecting, and started off in a blur of oblivion that clarified when I heard the word "faggot," "pansy," and a brief unfavorable editorial about a piece of graphic art I'd displayed on an art forum and described as the experience of being transgendered. Apparently, golf clubs make excellent commentaries. Fortunately for me, a neighbor was taking out the garbage, and had the heart to intervene.

Of course, this didn't make me immediately want to "come out" and pursue gender change. It doesn't usually work that way. On the contrary, it terrified me to no end. I would look out the windows to make sure nobody was in the parking lot before I left my apartment for my car. I checked the back seat before opening the car door. I looked under the undercarriage as I approached to make sure no one was hiding there. I didn't go anywhere I didn't have to -- just work to home to work to home. Half the time, I was too scared to stop for groceries, and spent more than a few evenings starving because I didn't have the nerve to pick up any bread on the way home, and the shelves had grown bare. I never let Mercedes out, even if I had the curtains drawn. Of course, unlike transvestites, the appeal for me was never quite so much about clothes as about being able to look into the mirror and feel comfortable with what I saw, so this wasn't devastating for me... but it was still isolating. I withdrew from email and forums and every other form of contact I had with the outside world. It was two months of suffocation of the highest order.

The brick wall of realization was this: I could either try to bury what I was even deeper down than before, try to hide it even more carefully and not even allow myself the luxury of living it in secret or expressing it in art / writing... or I could face up to what I was, and finally do something about it. I had already seen the hate. I already knew what was out there. The brick wall of realization showed me that was that this was a price I was willing to pay. I discovered that I'd rather live a year as a woman than a thousand as a man. I was dying. It was change or suicide.

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The fear is still there, but it no longer has that kind of hold on me. My early experiences of transition have been largely positive. Of course, I was escorted out of WalMart once, after my voice gave me away while I was asking for directions. I had one Medicenter (walk-in clinic) doctor refuse to give me a referral to the gender clinic and another Medicenter doc refuse to treat me for an ear infection once I answered the question of what medications I was taking (there's no graceful way for someone who just stepped out of work in boy mode to answer "Premarin"). I had a Safeway clerk ring through most of my groceries but attempted to refuse to sell me a stick of "Soft & Dri" deodorant (yes, ladies, it really is strong enough for a man but made for a woman), saying "you don't need this" -- I just waited until she finally rolled her eyes and gave in. But my experiences have been far more positive than not. What I hear most from people is that they admire my courage. In terms of frequency, the snickers come in second... but compared to golf club commentaries, snickers are a breeze, and mostly bounce right off.

So now comes the redefining of Mercedes Allen. I've been on hormones for over two months, and been seeing one therapist and will be seeing a second shortly. I've discussed transition with my boss, and although I'm not out at work yet, there is a plan to implement the change soon. Now, I'm living full-time, outside of work.

And now, I'm unlearning all the boy stuff. All the times I was visiting my friend and his loud, opinionated older brother gave me gentle pointers along the lines of "you look like a pansy faggot doing that: men don't cross their legs like that, they're supposed to keep them wide, like this" and the like... all those things can now be let go. That's most of the process. I'm not trying to act feminine quite so much as trying to eliminate some of these things that I once tried to drill into my behavior. Of course, I don't have the benefit of a stretch of adolescent years filled with friends' advice, parental guidance and the socialization that women get in their teens, so I have awkward moments that still give me away. It takes time, and there will be things to learn after male things are unlearned.

But I'm amazed how turning those palms just those few degrees forwards pulls up my posture, draws my elbows in, keeps me from lunging forward with my shoulders, and creates a whole new sense of grace. I can breathe again.